


o give me a home

by appleheart



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Brain Damage, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Kindness, Memory Loss, better living through chores
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-06
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-08-19 23:04:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 3,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8227822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/appleheart/pseuds/appleheart
Summary: Maybe they were cannibals and cold-blooded killers. Maybe they were just poor suckers who didn’t get a better deal offered to them other than to pick up a weapon, to march under this or that flag, and to hold onto whatever joy and companionship they find until the day they stop a bullet. 
Specs can’t know. She figures it best to treat the dead as though they loved and were loved in return. Even if the bullet they stopped was her own.





	1. miles to go

**Author's Note:**

> Compiled snippets about a Courier making the Mojave a better place, one trash can and decent funeral at a time.

She talks to herself constantly, not terribly conscious of it. Mumbling soft reassurances and plans as they come into her head. All the long limping way from Primm to Mojave Outpost with blood on her shins and radscorpion venom in her blood, she tells herself that she is going to lie down on a soft bed, she’s going to dig out the stingers and the grit with a flick of her thumbnail, she’s going to get a cold bottle of sarsaparilla for her trouble.

She says as much to the traveling merchant when he gives a friendly holler. _Soft bed,_ she pants in reply, pinching the sweaty, sunburnt bridge of her nose to force her doubled vision together. _Stingers… thumbnail._

The merchant nods sagely and gestures for his hired bodyguard to keep her piece levelled, in case the wide-eyed, wheezing scarecrow turns out to be dangerous. Which she is, but not to him.

Eventually, it is true about the bed. Even about the sarsaparilla. A few go-rounds with Mojave Outpost’s overworked medic and she’s good to go, with bubbling scars from knee to ankle for a souvenir. ( _Good to go_ , she repeats quietly, lacing up her boots, _good to go, good to go._ )


	2. homeward bound

It occurs to Specs that she must have had a home before.

 _I had a home,_ she tells the silent Mojave. When she does, the muscles of her mouth twitch tight in a way that could become either a grin or a bout of loud, ugly sobs--hard to say which. So she says the words again and again, mouthing the syllables until the end of _home_ feels like a kiss and her facial muscles are her own again.

Then she continues saying it simply because it sounds good. Its rhythm matches the crunch of grit under her feet.

_I-had. A-home._

She’s pretty sure of it, anyway. And she wants to believe. She wants to be the kind of person with a home to return to someday when all the dust settles.

Besides, don’t they say the body has its own memory? Going through dead men’s houses, her hands straighten rifled bookshelves, her hip bumps shut a gaping cabinet drawer: a familiar dance of domestic tidying, which means she must have known the tune. (And she also always, _always_ expects the washroom to be on the right-hand side from the front door. That must mean something, too.)

She must have had a dog, too, if the way her greedy fingers twitch toward every passing stranger’s pup is any indication.

It could be another matter of wanting-to-believe, but when she tells herself about a little clapboard house gone all blond in the sun, with honey mesquite growing on either side of the door and a good sturdy eight-foot chain fence all the way around, and a patchy hound wriggling its stump of a tail to say howdy, well—

The blisters don’t sting so fierce, is all.

If she had a home, she hopes that it’s standing tall somewhere, and hasn’t burned down to ribs like so many she sees. She hopes someone has moved in and kept the sandy dust from filling up the corners. If not, she hopes it’s only become a home to not-so-bad things. Rats, not radscorpions. Or raiders.

She hopes no one has pissed in (or died in) her bed, because she’s pretty sure she would have had a nice one, as much as she thinks about sheets soft as babyskin from washings, smelling all sunny from drying on a line.

She hopes her dog–if there was a dog–is getting old and fat and happy in some prospector’s yard. Too often there’s just _gone._ A person could have moved on or got married, got sick, got sold, got shot—no one remains to say. There’s just a house, empty like a skull, and clothes in the drawers and dishes on the table like unfinished thoughts. Specs isn’t dead, apparently, but as far as her theoretical house is concerned, she’s as _gone_ as anyone can ever be.

If someone is using it, they don’t know what happened to her. She’ll never know what happened, either. Whatever she thinks and hopes she once had isn’t hers anymore, and never will be.

But Specs believes in karma of sorts. She keeps these empty houses tidy when she borrows them, and makes the bed if she sleeps in it, and takes all the festering cans and bottles out to the trash. Maybe someone is doing the same for her own.


	3. vault 11

Specs cries over Vault 11--just bursts into wracking sobs in the middle of the vault’s decrepit cafeteria. The weight of grief buckles her knees and she drops hard onto the blistered flooring. For a few minutes, it is all she can do to wrap her arms around herself and rock, weeping. Her gasping mouth fills up with tears, her nose with snot. Even when her vision blears, in her mind she still sees the skeletons of the vault dwellers, dark with age.

At her first cry, Boone jerks around, rifle swinging to his shoulder. He lowers it slowly when he sees no danger, only a sobbing Mojave Express courier with no visible wounds (no fresh ones, anyhow.)

He stands over her, giving her a minute to recover. When she does not, he prowls onward. He rifles through the cabinets for usable salvage. He stoops to twist the edible hind legs off the mantis she shot when they entered.

He sees the skeletons too, of course. He remarked tersely on their arrangement, noting the defensibility of the positions they had failed to hold, the traps they laid for one another.

It is not the senseless waste of lives that breaks her heart. (They have yet to discover the Ombudsman’s speech, the fatal chamber beneath the Overseer’s office, the messages left in the vault mainframe. By the time they do, Specs will have recovered her composure. She will just blow air over her lips-– _oh fuck, fuck, fuck_ –and Boone will agree with a jerk of his chin.) Specs, like Boone, has seen her share of bodies. In the Mojave, death is as common as a sunset. Perhaps more certain, since even the sun is dying.

No: what rips the wail from her throat and drives her to her knees, it isn’t the dead bodies of the vault dwellers. It is the sheer _number_ of persons lying here unburied. A whole community dead, down to the last infant child, and no one mourns them.

Even if there were not too many bodies to relocate—

–even if the years had not jigsawed one set of moldering bones into another–

–even if the lower chambers had not flooded beyond hope of retrieving any bodies there–

—even then, anyone who knows the names of the dead lies among their number.

What Specs thinks as she cries is that at least the NCR _knows_ about the Nipton massacre. Any settler, soldier, courier, or trader who asks about friends or family gets an answer. They get a grave (a vast one) at which to pay their respects.

But this vault is not a proper tomb. The dead here are anonymous and uncounted. When she and Boone leave, sealing the vault behind them, they will be forgotten.

Specs was meant to go the same way–one unmarked grave hidden amidst a dozen others–and she still does not know why.

She cries over Vault 11 because she does not know who might have cried over her.


	4. bury the dead

No doubt some of the dead vault dwellers deserved no better than to lie uncovered in the dark for centuries. Specs doesn’t need a recorded confession to tell her this. She doesn’t recognize a lot of faces since she took that bullet to the cranium, but that doesn’t stop her from knowing _people._

She doesn’t need to taste dirty water to know it for toxic, either.

The way she sees it, the number of individuals out to do harm is pretty small. But the individuals out for themselves alone and devil take the hindmost, well–they make up a pretty hefty proportion of the population of human beings, and in the long run, that’s nearly as bad. 

But there _is_ a line, however thin, between “vicious” and “selfish-and-scared.” No one can say which is which from the outside of a man’s brain.

And in the back of her own, Specs hears _Even bad men love their mommas_. (Which isn’t necessarily true, all things considered, but it still leads to Specs herself muttering _Even bad men, even bad men_ as she sights down a rifle scope, up until the moment Boone gives her that particular hiss that means, in Boone’s parsimonious vocabulary, “kindly desist from speaking when we are about to ambush these Vipers, as their hearing may be sharper than you think.”)

This is why Specs buries the Legionary that Boone popped off at a quarter mile’s distance, before she’d even seen the man to tell him to stand down. Specs cuts down the crucified Powder Gangers in the smoking ruins of Nipton. Specs pockets the dog tags of the dead NCR troopers she finds, even before the quartermaster at Camp Forlorn Hope asks her to keep an eye out for his girls and boys, sure that _someone_ would want to know their fate.

Maybe they’re cannibals and cold-blooded killers. Maybe they’re just poor suckers who didn’t get a better deal offered to them other than to pick up a weapon, to march under this or that flag, and to hold onto whatever joy and companionship they find until the day they stop a bullet. Specs can’t know. She figures it best to treat the dead as though they loved and were loved in return--even if the bullet they stopped was her own.

She often wonders which type of person she had been: that Courier Six who took the wrong delivery or the wrong turn. Who died on her knees in the Goodsprings Cemetery, palms raw from digging her own shallow grave. Who came back to life on Doc Mitchell’s operating table and gradually, cobbling together scraps of memory and purpose, became Specs.

She worries that she might have been the first type. The vicious kind. Maybe the bullet she stopped was hard-earned, and her anonymous grave well-deserved.

“What bullshit” is Trudy’s succinct answer to this line of speculation. The bartender-slash-mayor of Goodsprings is well versed in Specs’ internal dilemma, given that Specs has been debating it with herself aloud for the past hour while fiddling with Trudy’s busted radio. “You’re a decent person, Specs.”

This is a more generous statement than it first appears, given that Specs once shot a man dead in Trudy’s own saloon.

(It was an accident of sorts. The man—a local—found her rummaging through Trudy’s cabinets. Afterwards, they reckoned he had taken her for some junkie thief. She looked the part, hollow-eyed and mumbling. He couldn’t know that she was brain-damaged, fresh out of surgery, looking for something familiar rather than valuable. She couldn’t know that the sudden grip on her nape wasn’t a deadly threat. Either way, he died.

Her first thought, spoken aloud in the quiet moment before the sound of the gunshot brought Trudy running, was that she wouldn’t need Sunny to show her around a pistol after all.)

Specs has since proved her goodwill to Goodsprings a dozen times over. But she still remembers how quick her finger was on the trigger when the rest of the world was still a fog, and she doubts herself.

Trudy lets her run out the tape on this line of thought, too. She fishes a frosted bottle of sarsaparilla from the fridge for each of them. “Bullshit,” she repeats, putting the bottle in Specs’ fingers to stop them from fiddling. (The radio continues to resist reparations.) “I’m not saying that cutting down a bunch of gangsters makes up for that, but what you do when you’re scared stiff and drugged silly, and what you do when you’re up and running? We’ve got the measure of you now.”

Specs isn’t sure.

“Specs, I heard about you crawling a mile from Nelson to keep from pissing off the Legion. No one, and I mean _no one_ , would have blamed you for taking a few of their patrols out on the way. But you kept it from coming to bloodshed.”

_Yellow-bellied coward, yellow dog down in the dirt._

“Maybe, maybe not. All I’m saying is, you came out of that grave a _kind_ person. Kindness isn’t the sort of thing you accidentally happen into for lack of a better idea. You hear me? I don’t know what trouble you got into before you came here, but you were decent back then, too. I’ve got no doubts about that.” Trudy clinks the neck of her bottle against Specs’. “Now drink that before it gets warm.”


	5. comfort

She collects teddy bears.

The first two were accidental, like so many other things that happened in the first bleary days after she was shot. She found them inside her pack when Sunny took her camping up at the Goodsprings source. She couldn’t say where she had gotten them, or long she had been hauling them around.

(The mystery bears tickled Sunny pink, as did the discovery that Specs did not actually need any training in the fine art of wilderness survival. Specs, expecting neither, was less delighted. A great deal scared her back then. Waking five seconds from becoming a gecko’s midnight snack was, by comparison, no need for alarm, being far easier to comprehend and to resolve to her satisfaction.)

Since then, she makes a point of picking up each abandoned bear she finds. And they must be well and truly abandoned—that’s the rule she sets for herself. Any time she suspects a long-absent owner might return for their bedmate, she tucks her itchy hands into her pockets. If the refrigerator is still purring and the sheets are rumpled, any desolate hovel might be someone’s home, no matter how much filth heaps up in the corners.

But the teddy bears she finds in burned-out ruins, in dumpsters, in bundles of bloodstained sheets outside of a doctor’s shack—those become hers. Fair salvage.

By the time she steps into the shadow of New Vegas’ walls, she has ten.

At ten, a collection becomes a hoard–although “horde” might the better term for her tattered army. Stuffing bleeds from their torn seams. Their felt bodies are pilled-up, stained, matted, and singed. Some of them are missing limbs, eyes, heads. One is little more than a limp rag with ears and a querulous folded-up raisin of a face. They smell like grief.

Every night, Specs sleeps with a different one tucked in the crook of her elbow. She cuddles them under the desert stars and exhales sweet sarsaparilla breath into their sour, worn-out plush. Whenever she has the luxury of a real bed–one surrounded by four walls and a roof–she takes each teddy bear out of her pack. She heaps them up on the counterpane, burrows into their midst like a grub, and sleeps warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, my savegame now has 43 teddy bears and still going strong.


	6. talks like a gentleman

Out of all the people in New Vegas proper--the friends who aren't riding her dusty coattails all the way to the Presidential Suite of the Lucky 38, that is--her favorite is The King.

She finds him compelling in a way that has nothing to do with swagger or style or hair pomade, and a  _ very great deal _ to do with a sleepy drawl and a way of looking at someone as if they were of particular and riveting importance. She likes to think that they have a special understanding.

Of course, the same is true of every other one of The King's groupies. All telling themselves that they really  _ get _ him, that it's not an infatuation, but a bond. It's in the way he treats each of them.

And sure, he may like Specs fine, but so did Benny right up until he put a bullet in her head and erased her--

But Specs is wiser now, and still takes companionship where she can get it. And if The King of Freeside isn't too busy to sit on a stoop in the falling twilight and loan a cigarette to a stiff and scuffed-up ex-Courier who can't shut her ever-loving mouth, well, she'll enjoy the company while she has it. His voice smooths over her nerves like a glass of red-gold whiskey.


	7. brand loyalty

She hasn't been able to drink Sunset Sarsaparilla for a good while. Not since the factory. Just the faintest whiff of its syrupy sweetness and she’ll shudder, remembering how her feet stuck to the tacky floor. Each step meant peeling free, her toes curling hard within her oversized boots and her thighs burning with the effort.

She felt like a fly on a strip of sticky tape. No thanks, pardner, as Festus the Animated Rancher would say.

On the other hand, Nuka-Cola tastes like flat, sour beer. Which she has certainly drunk, and will drink again, but if there's not even a buzz coming her way then what's the point?

 


	8. precautions

Sure, she'll take advantage of Mr. House’s hospitality. The sheets are soft and clean in the Lucky 38 Presidential Suite. The water in the taps runs full hot and full cold, with enough pressure to scour the deadstuff straight off a girl's sunburned shoulders. What she puts into the fridge doesn't come out tasting just a little bit like wilted broccoli.

But she keeps her things in Novac. The Lucky 38 is a gilded beartrap, shining so pretty and ready to snap shut.

Not that it will really matter if House turns on her. The day that the old man decides to bump her off, he'll do a damn sight better than Benny--and this time, that robot Victor will be the one to put her in the ground, not take her out.

But just in case.

Whatever Specs cherishes, all the things she really needs--ammunition and food and good armor and bits of gadgetry--she leaves far away, out of House's sight. Her friends know the room number. The rent is all paid up to the end of the year.

The only creatures to keep all their eggs in one basket are deathclaws, after all. The rest of the world has to scatter their chances and hope for the best.


End file.
